Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with the flash of truth.
—Jules Michelet, French historian (1798-1874)
THE GREEKS WERE fallible. Heavy objects do not fall faster than lighter ones. The Earth is not the center of the universe, and the heart is not a furnace that heats the blood but a pump that circulates it around the body. But only in the early seventeenth century, as astronomers and anatomists uncovered previously unseen worlds, did European thinkers seriously begin to challenge the old certainties of Greek philosophy. Pioneers such as Galileo Galilei in Italy and Francis Bacon in England rejected blind faith in ancient texts in favor of direct observation and experiment. “There is no hope of any major increase in scientific knowledge by grafting or adding the new on top of the old,” Bacon declared in his book The New Logic, published in 1620. “The restoration of the sciences must start from the bottom-most foundations—unless we prefer to go round in perpetual circles at a contemptibly slow rate.” Bacon led the denunciation of the influence of the Greek philosophers. He and his followers wanted to demolish the edifice of human knowledge and rebuild it, one brick at a time, on solid new foundations. Everything could be challenged, nothing assumed. The way had been cleared by the religious wars of the Restoration, which reduced the authority of the church, particularly in northern Europe. The new rationalism flourished in England and the Netherlands, driven in part by the challenges of exploiting and maintaining far-flung overseas colonies, and giving rise to the flurry of intellectual activity known as the Scientific Revolution.
This spirit of rational inquiry spread into the mainstream of Western thought over the next two centuries, culminating in the movement called the Enlightenment, as the empirical, skeptical approach adopted by scientists was applied to philosophy, politics, religion, and commerce. During this Age of Reason, Western thinkers moved beyond the wisdom of the ancients and opened themselves to new ideas, pushing out the frontiers of knowledge beyond Old-World limits in an intellectual counterpoint to the geographic expansion of the Age of Exploration. Out went dogmatic reverence for authority, whether philosophical, political, or religious; in came criticism, tolerance, and freedom of thought.
The diffusion of this new rationalism throughout Europe was mirrored by the spread of a new drink, coffee, that promoted sharpness and clarity of thought. It became the preferred drink of scientists, intellectuals, merchants, and clerks—today we would call them “information workers”—all of whom performed mental work sitting at desks rather than physical labor in the open. It helped them to regulate the working day, waking them up in the morning and ensuring that they stayed alert until the close of the business day, or longer if necessary. And it was served in calm, sober, and respectable establishments that promoted polite conversation and discussion and provided a forum for education, debate, and self-improvement.
The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were far safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated, particularly in squalid and crowded cities. (Spirits were not everyday staples like wine and beer; they were for getting drunk.) Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. Those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert and stimulated, rather than relaxed and mildy inebriated, and the quality and quantity of their work improved. Coffee came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol, sobering rather than intoxicating, heightening perception rather than dulling the senses and blotting out reality. An anonymous poem published in London in 1674 denounced wine as the “sweet Poison of the Treacherous Grape” that drowns “our very Reason and our Souls.” Beer was condemned as “Foggy Ale” that “beseig’d our Brains.” Coffee, however, was heralded as
… that Grave and Wholesome Liquor,
That heals the Stomach, makes the Genius quicker,
Relieves the Memory, revives the Sad,
and cheers the Spirits, without making Mad.
Western Europe began to emerge from an alcoholic haze that had lasted for centuries. “This coffee drink,” wrote one English observer in 1660, “hath caused a greater sobriety among the Nations. Whereas formerly Apprentices and clerks with others used to take a morning draught of Ale, Beer, or Wine, which, by the dizziness they cause in the Brain, made many unfit for business, they use now to play the Good-fellows in this wakeful and civil drink.” Coffee was also regarded as an antidote to alcohol in a more literal sense. “Coffee sobers you up instantaneously,” declared Sylvestre Dufour, a French writer, in 1671. The notion that coffee counteracts drunkenness remains prevalent to this day, though there is little truth to it; coffee makes someone who has drunk alcohol feel more alert, but actually reduces the rate at which alcohol is removed from the bloodstream.
Coffee’s novelty further contributed to its appeal. Here was a drink that had been unknown to the Greeks and Romans; drinking it was yet another way seventeenth-century thinkers could emphasize that they had moved beyond the limits of the ancient world. Coffee was the great soberer, the drink of clear-headedness, the epitome of modernity and progress—the ideal beverage, in short, for the Age of Reason.
Coffee’s stimulating effect had been known about for some time in the Arab world, where coffee originated. There are several romantic stories of its discovery. One tells of an Ethiopian goatherd who noticed that his flock became particularly frisky after consuming the brownish purple cherries from a particular tree. He then tried eating them himself, noted their stimulating powers, and passed his discovery on to a local imam. The imam, in turn, devised a new way to prepare the berries, drying them and then boiling them in water to produce a hot drink, which he used to keep himself awake during overnight religious ceremonies. Another story tells of a man named Omar who was condemned to die of starvation in the desert outside Mocha, a city in Yemen, on the southwestern corner of the Arabian peninsula. A vision guided him to a coffee tree, whereupon he ate some of its berries. This gave him sufficient strength to return to Mocha, where his survival was taken as a sign that God had spared him in order to pass along to humankind knowledge of coffee, which then became a popular drink in Mocha.
As with the legends associated with the discovery of beer, these tales may contain a grain of truth, for the custom of drinking coffee seems to have first become popular in Yemen in the mid-fifteenth century. While coffee berries may have been chewed for their invigorating effects before this date, the practice of making them into a drink seems to be a Yemeni innovation, often attributed to Muhammad al-Dhabhani, a scholar and a member of the mystical Sufi order of Islam, who died around 1470. By this time, coffee (known in Arabic as qahwah) had undoubtedly been adopted by Sufis, who used it to ward off sleep during nocturnal religious ceremonies in which the participants reached out to God through repetitive chanting and swaying.
As coffee percolated throughout the Arab world—it had reached Mecca and Cairo by 1510—the exact nature of its physical effects became the subject of much controversy. Coffee shook off its original religious associations and became a social drink, sold by the cup on the street, in the market square, and then in dedicated coffeehouses. It was embraced as a legal alternative to alcohol by many Muslims. Coffeehouses, unlike the illicit taverns that sold alcohol, were places where respectable people could afford to be seen. But coffee’s legal status was ambiguous. Some Muslim scholars objected that it was intoxicating and therefore subject to the same religious prohibition as wine and other alcoholic drinks, which the prophet Muhammad had prohibited.
Religious leaders invoked this rule in Mecca in June 1511, the earliest known of several attempts to ban the consumption of coffee. The local governor, a man named Kha’ir Beg, who was responsible for maintaining public morality, literally put coffee on trial. He convened a council of legal experts and placed the accused—a large vessel of coffee—before them. After a discussion of its intoxicating effects, the council agreed with Kha’ir Beg that the sale and consumption of coffee should be prohibited. The ruling was proclaimed throughout Mecca, coffee was seized and burned in the streets, and coffee vendors and some of their customers were beaten as a punishment. Within a few months, however, higher authorities in Cairo overturned Kha’ir Beg’s ruling, and coffee was soon being openly consumed again. His authority undermined, Kha’ir Beg was replaced as governor the following year.
But was coffee really an intoxicant? Muslim scholars had already spent much effort debating whether the prophet had meant to ban intoxicating drinks altogether or merely the act of drinking to intoxication. Everyone agreed on the need for a legal definition of intoxication, and several such definitions were duly devised. An intoxicated person was variously defined as someone who “becomes absent-minded and confused,” “departs from whatever he has in the way of mild virtue and tranquility into foolishness and ignorance,” or “comprehends absolutely nothing at all, and who does not know a man from a woman, or the earth from the heavens.” These definitions, devised as part of the scholarly argument about alcoholic drinks, were then applied to coffee.
Yet coffee clearly failed to produce any such effects in the drinker, even when consumed in large quantities. In fact, it did quite the opposite. “One drinks coffee with the name of the Lord on his lips and stays awake,” noted one coffee advocate, “while the person who seeks wanton delight in intoxicants disregards the Lord, and gets drunk.” Coffee’s opponents tried to argue that any change in the drinker’s physical or mental state was grounds on which to ban coffee. The drink’s defenders successfully parried this argument too, noting that spicy foods, garlic, and onions also produced physical effects, such as watering eyes, but that their consumption was perfectly legal.
Although Kha’ir Beg’s superiors in Cairo did not uphold his ban on the sale and consumption of coffee, they did echo his disapproval of gatherings and places where it was drunk. Indeed, it was not so much coffee’s effects on the drinker but the circumstances in which it was consumed that worried the authorities, for coffeehouses were hotbeds of gossip, rumor, political debate, and satirical discussion. They were also popular venues for chess and backgammon, which were regarded as morally dubious. Technically, board games were only banned under Islamic law if bets were placed on their outcome. But the fact that they were played at all added to the perception, among opponents of coffeehouses, that such establishments were at best places of lax morality and at worst dens of plotting and sedition.
There were many further attempts to close down coffeehouses, for example in Mecca in 1524 and Cairo in 1539, though such closures were usually short-lived. For despite these efforts, and the denunciation of coffee drinkers as layabouts or gossips, no law was actually being broken, so attempts to ban coffee ultimately failed. By the early seventeenth century, visiting Europeans were commenting on the widespread popularity of coffeehouses in the Arab world, and their role as meeting places and sources of news. William Biddulph, an English traveler, noted in 1609 that “their Coffa houses are more common than Ale-houses in England. … If there be any news it is talked of there.” George Sandys, another English traveler who visited Egypt and Palestine in 1610, observed that “although they be destitute of Taverns, yet have they their Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There they sit chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drinke called Coffa (of the berry that it is made of) in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it; blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.”
One possible objection to the adoption of coffee in Europe— its association with Islam—was dispelled around this time. Shortly before his death in 1605, Pope Clement VIII was asked to state the Catholic church’s position on coffee. At the time, the drink was a novelty little known in Europe except among botanists and medical men, including those at the University of Padua, a leading center for medical research. Coffee’s religious opponents argued that coffee was evil: They contended that since Muslims were unable to drink wine, the holy drink of Christians, the devil had punished them with coffee instead. But the pope had the final say. A Venetian merchant provided a small sample for inspection, and Clement decided to taste the new drink before making his decision. The story goes that he was so enchanted by its taste and aroma that he approved its consumption by Christians.
Within half a century, this exotic novelty was fast becoming commonplace in parts of western Europe. Coffeehouses opened in Britain in the 1650s and in Amsterdam and The Hague during the 1660s. As coffee moved west, it took the Arab notion of the coffeehouse as a more respectable, intellectual, and above all nonalcoholic alternative to the tavern along with it—and more than a whiff of controversy.
Coffee could have been tailor-made for the London of the 1650s and 1660s. The first coffeehouses appeared during the rule of the puritanical Oliver Cromwell, who came to power at the end of the English civil war after the dethronement and execution of King Charles I. England’s coffeehouses got their start, in Puritan times, as more respectable and temperate alternatives to taverns. They were well lit, and adorned with bookshelves, mirrors, pictures in gilt frames, and good furniture, in stark contrast to the gloom and squalor of the taverns where alcohol was served. Following Cromwell’s death in 1658, public opinion turned in favor of restoring the monarchy, and during this time, coffeehouses became centers of political debate and intrigue as the way was cleared for the accession of Charles II in 1660. William Coventry, one of the king’s advisers, noted that Charles’s supporters had often met in coffeehouses during Cromwell’s rule, and that “the King’s friends had then used more liberty of speech in these places than they durst to do in any other.” He suggested that the king might not have gained his throne but for the gatherings that took place in coffeehouses.
At the same time, London was emerging as the hub of a thriving commercial empire. The embrace of coffeehouses by businessmen, for whom they provided convenient and respectable public places in which to meet and do business, ensured their continued popularity after the Restoration. By appealing to Puritans, plotters, and capitalists alike, London’s coffeehouses matched the city’s mood perfectly.
The city’s first coffeehouse was opened in 1652 by Pasqua Rosee, the Armenian servant of an English merchant named Daniel Edwards who had acquired a taste for coffee while traveling in the Middle East. Edwards introduced his friends in London to coffee, which Rosee would prepare for him several times a day. So enthusiastic were they for the new drink that Edwards decided to set Rosee up in business as a coffee seller. The handbill announcing the launch of Rosee’s business, titled The Vertue of the Coffee Drink, shows just how much of a novelty coffee was. It assumes total ignorance of coffee on the part of the reader, explaining the drink’s origins in Arabia, the method of its preparation, and the customs associated with its consumption. Much of the handbill was concerned with coffee’s supposed medicinal qualities. It was said to be effective against sore eyes, headache, coughs, dropsy, gout, and scurvy, and to prevent “Mis-carryings in Child-bearing Women.” But it was perhaps the explanation of the commercial benefits of coffee that drew Rosee’s customers in: “It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to Watch; and therefore you are not to Drink of it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.”
Such was Rosee’s success that the local tavern keepers protested to the lord mayor that Rosee had no right to set up a business in competition with them, since he was not a freeman of the City. Rosee was ultimately forced out of the country, but the idea of the coffeehouse had taken hold, and further examples sprung up during the 1650s. By 1663 the number of coffeehouses in London had reached eighty-three. Many of them were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but even more arose in their place, and by the end of the century there were hundreds of them. One authority puts the total at three thousand, though that seems unlikely in a city with a population of just six hundred thousand at the time. (Coffeehouses sometimes served other drinks too, such as hot chocolate and tea, but their orderly and convivial atmosphere was inspired by Arabian coffeehouses, and coffee was the predominant drink.)
Not everyone approved, however. Alongside the tavern keepers and vintners, who had commercial reasons for objecting to coffee, the drink’s opponents included medical men who believed the new drink was poisonous and commentators who, echoing Arab critics of coffee, worried that coffeehouses encouraged time-wasting and trivial discussion at the expense of more important activities. Others simply objected to the taste of coffee, which was disparaged as “syrup of soot” or “essence of old shoes.” (Coffee, like beer, was taxed by the gallon, which meant it had to be made up in advance. Cold coffee from a barrel was then reboiled before serving, which cannot have done much for the taste.)
The result was a stream of pamphlets and broadsides on both sides of the debate, with such titles as A Coffee Scuffle (1662), A Broadside Against Coffee (1672), In Defence of Coffee (1674), and Coffee Houses Vindicated (1675). One notable attack on London’s coffeehouses came from a group of women, who published The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, representing to public consideration the grand inconveniences accruing to their sex from the excessive use of the drying and enfeebling Liquor. The women complained that their husbands were drinking so much coffee that they were becoming “as unfruitful as the deserts, from where that unhappy berry is said to be brought.” Furthermore, since the men were spending all their time in coffeehouses, from which women were prohibited, “the whole race was in danger of extinction.”
The simmering debate over the merits of coffee prompted the British authorities to act. King Charles II had, in fact, been looking for a pretext to move against the coffeehouses for some time. Like his counterparts in the Arab world, he was suspicious of the freedom of speech allowed in coffeehouses and their suitability for hatching plots. Charles was particularly aware of this, since coffeehouse machinations had played a small part in his own accession to the throne. On December 29, 1675, the king issued a “Proclamation for the suppression of Coffee-houses,” declaring that since such establishments “have produced very evil and dangerous effects … for that in such Houses … divers False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majestie’s Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; His Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary, That the said Coffee-Houses be (for the future) Put down and Suppressed.”
The result was a public outcry, for coffeehouses had by this time become central to social, commercial, and political life in London. When it became clear that the proclamation would be widely ignored, which would undermine the government’s authority, a further proclamation was issued, announcing that coffee sellers would be allowed to stay in business for six months if they paid five hundred pounds and agreed to swear an oath of allegiance. But the fee and time limit were soon dropped in favor of vague demands that coffeehouses should refuse entry to spies and mischief makers. Not even the king could halt the march of the coffee.
Similarly, doctors in Marseilles, where France’s first coffeehouse had opened in 1671, attacked coffee on health grounds at the behest of wine merchants who feared for their livelihood. Coffee, they declared, was a “vile and worthless foreign novelty … the fruit of a tree discovered by goats and camels [which] burned up the blood, induced palsies, impotence and leanness” and would be “hurtful to the greater part of the inhabitants of Marseilles.” But this attack did little to slow the spread of coffee; it had already caught on as a fashionable drink among the aristocracy, and coffeehouses were flourishing in Paris by the end of the century. When coffee became popular in Germany, the composer Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a “Coffee Cantata” satirizing those who unsuccessfully opposed coffee on medical grounds. Coffee was also embraced in Holland, where one writer observed in the early eighteenth century that “its use has become so common in our country that unless the maids and seamstresses have their coffee every morning, the thread will not go through the eye of the needle.” The Arab drink had conquered Europe.
Until the end of the seventeenth century, Arabia was unchallenged as supplier of coffee to the world. As one Parisian writer explained in 1696, “Coffee is harvested in the neighbourhood of Mecca. Thence it is conveyed to the port of Jiddah. Hence it is shipped to Suez, and transported by camels to Alexandria. Here, in the Egyptian warehouses, French and Venetian merchants buy the stock of coffee-beans they require for their respective homelands.” Coffee was also shipped, on occasion, directly from Mocha by the Dutch. But as coffee’s popularity grew, European countries began to worry about their dependency on this foreign product and set about establishing their own supplies. The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas.
First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spice trade in the process and briefly becoming the world’s leading commercial power. Dutch sailors purloined cuttings from Arab coffee trees, which were taken to Amsterdam and successfully cultivated in greenhouses. In the 1690s coffee plantations were established by the Dutch East India Company at Batavia in Java, an island colony in what is now Indonesia. Within a few years, Java coffee shipped directly to Rotterdam had granted the Dutch control of the coffee market. Arabian coffee was unable to compete on price, though connoisseurs thought its flavor was superior.
Next came the French. The Dutch had helpfully demonstrated that coffee flourished in a similar climate to that required by sugar, which suggested that it would grow as well in the West Indies as it did in the East Indies. A Frenchman, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, who was a naval officer stationed on the French island of Martinique, took it upon himself to introduce coffee to the French West Indies. During a visit to Paris in 1723, he embarked on an entirely unofficial scheme to get hold of a cutting of a coffee tree to take back to Martinique. The only coffee tree in Paris was a well-guarded specimen in a greenhouse in the Jardin des Plantes, presented by the Dutch as a gift to Louis XIV in 1714; Louis, however, seems to have taken little interest in coffee. De Clieu could not simply help himself to a cutting from this royal tree, so he used his connections instead. He prevailed upon an aristocratic young lady to obtain a cutting from the royal doctor, who was entitled to use whatever plants he wanted in the preparation of medical remedies. This cutting was then passed back to de Clieu, who tended it carefully and took it, installed in a glass box, onto a ship bound for the West Indies.
If de Clieu’s self-aggrandizing account is to be believed, the plant faced numerous dangers on its journey across the Atlantic. “It is useless to recount in detail the infinite care that I was obliged to bestow upon this delicate plant during a long voyage, and the difficulties I had in saving it,” de Clieu wrote many years later, at the start of a detailed account of his perilous journey. First the plant had to brave the attentions of a mysterious passenger who spoke French with a Dutch accent. Every day de Clieu would carry his plant on deck to expose it to the sun, and after dozing next to his plant one day he awoke to find the Dutchman had snapped off one of its shoots. The Dutchman, however, disembarked at Madeira. The ship then had a brush with a pirate corsair and only narrowly escaped. The coffee plant’s glass box was damaged in the fight, so de Clieu had to ask the ship’s carpenter to repair it for him. Then followed a storm, which again damaged the box and soaked the plant with seawater. Finally, the ship was becalmed for several days, and drinking water had to be rationed. “Water was lacking to such an extent that for more than a month I was obliged to share the scanty ration of it assigned to me with my coffee plant, upon which my happiest hopes were founded,” de Clieu wrote.
Eventually, de Clieu and his precious cargo arrived at Martinique. “Arriving at home my first care was to set out my plant with great attention in the part of my garden most favorable to its growth,” he wrote. “Although keeping it in view, I feared many times that it would be taken from me; and I was at last obliged to surround it with thorn bushes and to establish a guard about it until it arrived at maturity … this precious plant which had become still more dear to me for the dangers it had run and the cares it had cost me.” Two years later, de Clieu gathered his first harvest from the plant. He then began to give cuttings of the plant to his friends, so that they could begin cultivation too. De Clieu also sent coffee plants to the islands of Santo Domingo and Guadeloupe, where they flourished. Coffee exports to France began in 1730, and production so exceeded domestic demand that the French began shipping the excess coffee from Marseilles to the Levant. Once again, Arabian coffee found it difficult to compete. In recognition of his achievement, de Clieu was presented in 1746 to Louis XV, who was keener on coffee than his father had been. At around the same time, the Dutch introduced coffee to Suriname, a colony in South America. Descendants of de Clieu’s original plant were also proliferating in the region, in Haiti, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Ultimately, Brazil became the world’s dominant coffee supplier, leaving Arabia far behind.
Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu shares his water ration with his coffee plant, while becalmed en route to Martinique.
Coffee had come a long way from its obscure origins as a religious drink in Yemen. After permeating the Arab world, it had been embraced throughout Europe and was then spread around the world by European powers. Coffee had come to worldwide prominence as an alternative to alcohol, chiefly favored by intellectuals and businessmen. But of even greater significance than this new drink was the novel way in which it was consumed: in coffeehouses, which dispensed conversation as much as coffee. In doing so, coffeehouses provided an entirely new environment for social, intellectual, commercial, and political exchange.